


Crisis in Your Eyes

by objectlesson



Category: Battlestar Galactica (1978)
Genre: Drunk Sex, M/M, Pre-Series, Starbuck/Apollo - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-03 06:39:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4090807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It started as a drunk half-mistake. Now they're both in over their heads.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crisis in Your Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> I finally buckled down and started watching the original BSG, mostly out of curiosity seeing as I am a huge fan of the 2003 reboot. I don't know why I didn't expect Starbuck and Apollo to be so gloriously flashy together seeing as their 2003 counterparts have one of the most beautiful, relatable, complicated canonical love stories of all time, but I didn't, for some reason. I have been pleasantly surprised! 1978 Starbuck and Apollo are so outrageously cute and so outrageously into each other that even Ronald D Moore was into it, so naturally, I had to write a little about them. 
> 
> Please excuse any incongruities with the language/ship layout, I found myself accidentally using Star Trek terminology here and there, and I'm not super familiar with the 78 universe (although I love it!)

The first time it happens, Starbuck can’t say he’d never thought about it before. Just wistfully, in passing, the same way he imagines traveling to some other solar system and forgetting his name and his duty to the fleet, instead settling down on a planet remote and tropical and alien, with beaches to spread out on soil to grow fruit trees in. The kind of dream everyone has, but never acts on. The kind of dream that gets Starbuck through the day in its blind, clumsy hope no different from hopelessness. 

It was supposed to stay that way. Remote and tropical and alien. Apollo the golden boy and Starbuck eternally at his side, his cad of a wingman, charming and flanked in women. Just two Warriors of the Colonial Fleet, and whatever Starbuck thought about beyond that banished to late nights alone, to the hours just after waking, to the slick of his hand in the shower on the days he’s not deterred by shame. 

He’s fine with that set up. It’s good, and safe, and usually enough. Apollo is his friend before anything else, and though Starbuck has fracked half the colonies, he only knows a few people he can call his friends. It seems important to keep it that way, to keep those things from mixing, even if he knows how good it would be, even if he’s half-sure Apollo wouldn’t stop him if he ever tried anything. 

But now it’s very late and Starbuck is very drunk, and Apollo might be even more so. They’re alone in the mess hall at the academy, on either side of a table strewn in empty, contraband ambrosa bottles and a careworn deck of cards, shoulders braced into one another messily as they laugh and laugh, the sound of it echoing off the walls. Starbuck is trying to invent a way to play a two-man pyramid game, but it’s not working. He keeps trying, and Apollo keeps drinking and scoffing and telling him its not gonna work, it can’t work. His hands are all over Starbuck’s back, heavy and fond, and Starbuck can’t care much about whether dreams are supposed to stay unrealized or come to fruition, he can’t care about a single fracking thing, he’s too warm and too alive. 

They’re young, and the night feels full of undifferentiated potential, the whole of space and stars just waiting to be split and bisected and torn apart into a million glorious shapes with a wake of viper exhaust. Starbuck almost gives up, swiping a handful of cards off the table and leaning too close as he tells Apollo about it, slurring a little as he asks, “You know that feeling, right when you exit the launch tube and you surface in the middle of all that black? And you could go anywhere, you could fly that viper anywhere in the whole _fracking universe_. The whole infinite universe, in that moment, is yours.” 

Apollo nods sagely, eyes such a pale green they almost look blue, blood-shot and half-lidded. His mouth is twisted into a funny kind of smile and Starbuck can’t help it, his stomach drops, his cheeks heat up and he leans closer, heart thrumming in time with the waves of drunk heat coming off of Apollo’s body. He has never been very good at stopping himself from making bad decisions, even when he knows what’s gonna work out better for him in the end. He remembers shrugging one time as he told Apollo about it, saying, _anything else seems like a mistake or lie, when you want the thing you want that badly._

“That is a beautiful feeling,” Apollo says eventually, picking at the frayed corner of a pyramid card, eyes still fixed unwaveringly to Starbuck’s, terrifically bright, the kind of eyes girls write poetry about. 

Starbuck swallows. “You ever wanna do something so bad you do it anyway, even though you know it’s gods awful idea?” 

Apollo’s gaze flicks down to Starbuck’s mouth, fingers flexing involuntarily on the table. “Yeah,” he answers, voice low, dangerous. “But I imagine you deal with that more than I do. Mister _anything else seems like a mistake or a lie_. I don’t usually let myself even get to the point where I have to make a decision about it.” 

He wonders if they are talking about the same thing, if they’re saying things without actually saying them at all. “Why?” Starbuck asks, mouth dry. He’s hyper aware of every place he and Apollo are touching, the press of his own knee into the solid heat of Apollo’s thigh as he straddles the bench, the way their shoulders brush and nudge together as they talk. He studies Apollo’s neck, brown skin shining in a thin sheen of perspiration, and there is nothing he wants more than to fix his open mouth there, to lick the salt from Apollo’s pulse and fist his hands in the loose, sheer off-white linen of his tunic. If Apollo lets him, he will. Anything else seems like a mistake, or a lie. 

Apollo laughs and it turns into a cough. Then he takes a thoughtful swig of ambrosa, throat flickering beneath the solitary yellow light above them and Starbuck grits his teeth together, sick with want. “Dunno. Fear, maybe. Maybe I’m afraid.” He shrugs, eyes flicking back to Starbuck for a moment, and the air feels thick, taut, loaded. All of space, billions of stars, and the few feet between them, heady and close with breath and the smell of ambrosa. “Why? What do you wanna do so bad?” 

Starbuck swallows, leans forward with a rabbiting heart and eyes wide and searching to slide his open palm up the flickering planes of muscle in Apollo’s thigh. Apollo flinches, but he doesn’t pull away, he sways and buckles and suddenly their brows are grinding together, sweat-sticky and hot, and it feels like exiting a launch tube, it feels like the promise of an infinite universe. Somewhere deep inside, Starbuck knows it’s not, that it can’t be. But with Apollo exhaling onto his lips, hands on his chest and eyes expectant like he wants more, he can’t make himself care. 

Starbuck does what he wants. He skates his mouth down the shuddering tendons in Apollo’s neck, he sucks the salt from him, he drags his hands across the bones in his sternum and rucks the neck of his tunic open so he can feel his skin, smooth and hot with drunk, clumsy yearning. All the while, Apollo is right there with him. Carding hands though his hair, hauling him up and off the bench gracelessly and pushing him onto his back, across the pyramid game, under the crushing weight of his chest. 

“Frack,” Apollo grinds out, breath labored chaos, ribcage heaving as he fumbles with his uniform pants, and Starbuck lays back on the table and just watches him with wide blue eyes. The room spins around him, a mess of darkness and then there’s Apollo, the golden boy, the kings son, with his shirt open down to his navel and marks beneath his clavicles from Starbuck’s teeth, eyes hazy as he struggles free from his waistband, terrible and beautiful.

_Now you’ve done it_ , Starbuck thinks, swallowing noisily, mind reeling over how badly he wants to get his mouth across every inch of Apollo’s skin, how much of him he wants to fit down his throat. It’s so stupid, so dangerous, there are reasons why he never let himself get this far into his half-choked fantasies, he _knows_ there are but he can’t remember a single one right now. Apollo is breath-stealing above him, the length of his cock thick and hot and impossibly heavy in Starbuck’s palm, and there’s no going back after this, no return to a time when he could have been satisfied remaining Apollo’s wingman, and nothing else. 

They don’t kiss until they have both finished, Apollo with a wrenched, broken sound as he comes over Starbuck’s fist, Starbuck inside his pants from the messy wreck of friction atop him. Starbuck tries to catch his breath, vision a mess of stars, but then Apollo braces himself with his arms, leans over him, and licks into his mouth. 

It is so filthy and so deliberate, the flick of his tongue across the roof of Starbuck’s mouth, making stars multiply, crowding out all the black until there is nothing but fierce white light. They break apart gasping. “You gonna throw me away like all your other girls?” Apollo mumbles into Starbuck’s lips, slurring, still sounding so drunk. 

Starbuck laughs, and it comes out as nothing but breath, messy and lost as he shakes his head, skull rolling on the table amid a ruin of pyramid cards, “It’s not gonna be me,” he tells Apollo, reaching for the bones in his face, thumbing along the perfect cut of his cheekbone like some fine facet of gemstone. “Who leaves.” 

Apollo lays down beside him on the table, eyes closed and chest shining in sweat, golden beneath the light. Starbuck can’t help it, he heaves himself up, swaying, so that he can taste Apollo’s skin again. Apollo threads his shaking hand through his hair to keep him there, but he doesn’t say anything. 

\---

Apollo never expected to get so hung up on fracking Starbuck. It was supposed to just be a thing that happened when they got drunk, a messy, unorthodox extension of their already close friendship. It was easy enough to explain it to himself like that anyway, at first. _He’s saved your ass a million times over, and you’ve done the same for him. You owe each other your lives, isn’t that more intimate than fracking? Is this really crossing a line?_ He wanted it to keep it from changing their friendship, from altering the pure, easy chemistry he felt when they were together. 

Of course, it doesn’t work out at neatly as Apollo plans. It may have started out at a drunken fumbling between friends at the academy, when there were no girls and too much ambrosa. It might have started as a manifestation of all the things they already were, but now Apollo is not so sure. It happens more and more, when they’re sober and when they’re seeing girlfriends, when they have, or at least should have, better things to do. 

Apollo has missed dates because he’s been so wrapped up in Starbuck, pinned up against the wall of the hangar deck after hours, fists in his uniform jacket, thinking just one more, one more time, and then it will go back to the way things were. But the promises are futile and hollow, it always comes back to this, and now it’s grown bigger then he ever intended it to be, something new and separate from their friendship, something with lungs and a heart that breathe and beat all on their own. It’s out of his control. 

It’s the same fracked up realization over and over again, that no matter how much energy Apollo pours into planning a mission, a strategy, a friendship, a relationship, it will _never_ play out as expected or intended. Apollo worries about things like control, he tries to live his life in a way where nothing he could otherwise plan for escapes him, but Starbuck, _Starbuck_ and his boy’s eyes, his hair rucked up in back from his viper helmet, he fracks everything up. 

Humanity is unpredictable and Starbuck is a particularly unpredictable specimen, so here they are. With Apollo wondering if he is one of one hundred other people all tripping over themselves to compete for Starbuck’s time, affection, charm. With Apollo wondering what it means to lie up at night thinking about the way someone’s mouth looks broken over a laugh, or stretched around his cock, when that same person is the person he wouldn’t think twice about dying for. It’s not what he planned. It’s not something he feels prepared to deal with. It’s out of his control, and he _hates_ when that happens. 

One time, months before Apollo ever wondered what it might feel like to have his lips scoured by the dusting of hair beneath Starbuck’s navel, they talked about love and about sex, up late in their bunks at the academy. Starbuck told him, _I try not to frack people I love. It’s easier that way._

Apollo had rolled his eyes, saying, _I try not to frack people I don’t love. It’s easier that way, too. Fewer hurt feelings._

_Yeah,_ Starbuck had said, eyebrows raised and a damp, unlit cigar hanging from his mouth. _But way more boring. And anyway, I don’t think it works like that. I think love is where the feelings get hurt, not sex. I think love is the real zinger._

Now, Apollo wonders how fracking each other is following either of their rules, how it fits into their loyalty and dedication to one another, how it coexists with their friendship, their particular brand of unique, military dictated investment in each other. Any way he looks at it, it _doesn’t_ fit in. His life is not the kind of life where he can love or frack his wingman in the way he might, or does. His life is one of plans, of control, of stability and eventual families, and Starbuck is the antithesis of all those things. 

Apollo knows this, he sees is clearly like the sickle-moon in the sky, fit perfectly for his hand to reach for and pull out of the night. But he never does. Instead he just lets it happen and happen, thinking, _maybe it will be fine. Maybe it’ll stop getting more and more intense and instead it’ll just fade out, back to normal, and we’ll both get married to girls and have kids and serve as witness at one another’s sealings, like we always planned. Maybe I do have it under control._

Starbuck once told him, _anything else seems like a mistake or a lie when you want the thing you want that badly_. Apollo thinks about this when they’re tangled up in each other sometimes, when Starbuck’s hair is in his fists and all he wants is to keep touching him, keep digging inside him, when he’s lost control and it feels _good_ , thrilling, perfect, to be following Starbuck headlong into bad decisions. 

Other times, it terrifies him that Starbuck is this way. That if anyone is going to save them, stop this before it careens into something irreparable, it has to be him. He knows he has a self-preservation instinct, somewhere, but it’s such a hard vein to draw blood from when his wingman is hades-bent on crashing and burning, and part of him wants to follow him blind into that wreckage. 

Apollo thinks of his his own sister and the hundreds of times he has seen her eyes red-rimmed and swollen from crying over Starbuck. He warns her to not get in too deep, that Starbuck is a great friend and a great wingman and one of the smartest, bravest, and most secretly sensitive people Apollo has ever met, but he’s not a good person to frack, to get hung up on. It’s a perfect way to get hurt, expecting something from Starbuck. He breaks hearts, it’s what he _does_ , he breaks other things, too. Apollo works to salvage, Starbuck shrugs and watches the lights from the explosion, saying impossible things like _sure is beautiful, though, right?_

It seems absurd, now, to consider his own advice and realize how grievously he’s ignoring it. He doesn’t know why he thinks his heart is different, unbreakable, impervious. He doesn’t know what makes him different than Athena, if there is anything at all. He knows little more than he wants Starbuck, wants him so hard and pure it makes him sick to think about, so he tries not to think about it unless he’s got Starbuck on his knees, unless he’s rubbing Starbucks cock through his uniform pants and can’t think about anything else. 

He wonders if Starbuck is fighting and losing the same battle, or if this is all just a game to him. They’re in Apollo’s bed at his apartment in Caprica, lounging and half stuck together in a tangle of navy sheets, hours before they have to report to the Galactica for duty. Apollo’s got his cheek still adhered to Starbuck’s stomach, idly razing his nails through the fine golden hair there, when Starbuck’s voice cuts into him, muffled around a cigar. “This sure is a stupid thing we’re doing, huh?” He mumbles, filling the room with a thick, sweet smoke. 

Apollo sucks it in; he hates smoking but he loves inhaling whatever Starbuck has just exhaled, loves tasting the air that has just been inside him. It’s an insane thing, attraction, the way it knows no bounds, shies at nothing no matter how bad the idea is. He sighs, flattening his palm up Stabuck’s sweat-sticky chest. When he turns to look at him, he’s smiling, eyes wide, expectant. He looks like a kid, like he often does, and it makes Apollo’s chest clench in something pure and unnamed. 

“Why?” he asks, even though he has answered this question for himself a million times over, even though he knows, _knows._

Starbuck is still smiling, but becomes forced and stilted, a skull’s grimace with his teeth dug into wet rolling papers. He reaches out and combs his fingers through Apollo’s hair, fingertips ghosting just under his chin before he drops his hand to his side, and he doesn’t look like a kid anymore. “Because it’s just gonna hurt worse when it blows up in our faces.” 

Apollo shifts his weight onto his elbows so he’s on his stomach beside Starbuck, bicep pressed into his ribs. He studies his face, wanting to ask _why? Why does it have to blow up? Why can’t it last, we’re gonna be friends forever, why does this have to be different?_ But he has answered this question for himself a million times over, and he knows, _knows_. Instead, he says nothing. He rubs his face into Starbuck’s underarm, then plucks the cigar from his lips and drops it into the tin cup on his own bedside table and kisses his soft, slack mouth. 

Starbuck kisses back, hands on Apollo’s neck, in his hair, across the planes of muscle in his shoulder and down his spine in great, greedy handfuls. “A stupid, stupid fracking thing,” he mumbles between wet drags and pulls of their teeth. “But you keep letting me do it.” 

“Why is it up to me to stop?” Apollo asks him, forcing his thighs apart with his hips, heart thundering with how easily Starbuck splits and arches for him, so pretty and gold, no wonder all he girls love him, he’s impossible. 

Starbuck shrugs under him, eyes twinkling. “You’re the captain, Captain.” 

Apollo pulls his head back by his hair to expose the line of his throat, bobbing and rippling with each breath. _It’s just gonna hurt worse_ , he thinks, trying on Starbuck’s words, sucking hard on his pulse where he tastes like iron and grease and salt and engine and leather, tastes like a viper, so perfect and dangerous. _When this blows up in our faces._

Then, in Starbuck’s awed, child’s voice like he’s watching fireworks, _sure is beautiful, though, right?_

\--

Starbuck is drunk again, so terribly drunk as he stumbles from the rejuvenation room and down the hall to the gym, which is empty and dark because everyone is still celebrating. Nobody wants to work out when its well after midnight and there’s still bootleg ambrosa to drink, and nobody will notice he’s gone, no one will follow him. 

Apollo is somewhere back with them, his arm slung around his latest girlfriend’s narrow white shoulders and his lips at her ear as he whispers things to her that Starbuck couldn’t hear above the din of inebriated laughter. It shouldn’t bother him, that Apollo is seeing someone, that he brings her to parties and kisses the smooth, pale curve of her cheek while the squadron cheers him on. It shouldn’t matter that when he meets Apollo’s eyes across the room, they’re crackling and unreadable, a dusky ocean-green that Starbuck wants to swallow, steal for himself, keep inside and warm his hands by. It shouldn’t matter at all, especially when Starbuck has at least three women all fawning over him, reaching for his arm and petting at his hair when he sits smokes and tries to make his laughs sound normal, losing game after game of pyramid. He’s absurd, and a hypocrite. He knows this. 

Still, it makes his stomach roil and turn every time he watches them together, makes his heart clench as if it is a fist poised to strike. He keeps downing shots to blur his vision, to numb the fissures of pain in his chest, but all it does it make him grows too loud and too dizzy. Worried he might say something, call Apollo out in front of the entire squadron and embarrass them both, he decides to leave. Wrenching himself up and away from the cloud of perfume, the rain of soft hands and clinking rings, he stumbles to his feet. “Uh, sorry, ladies,” he slurs, steadying himself with a hand braced to the door frame. “I need a little air.” 

He can feel Apollo’s eyes burning into him across the room, condemning him for acting unusually, for at least temporarily resigning from his usual duty as life of the party, champion pyramid player, seductive and suave and charismatic. Starbucks shakes his head, feeling resentful towards his reputation, towards the pressure to gracefully endure whatever may come with a smile, a laugh, a puff of smoke. 

Careening clumsily into the empty gym, Starbuck nearly falls to his knees. His hand shoots out in the dark, reaching for the nearest exercise machine to keep himself upright. The room spins, the equipment looking strange and distorted in its cloak of shadow, and Starbuck wonders what the frack he’s doing in here, why he’s not grown up enough to tolerate Apollo kissing some shuttle pilot girl’s cheek in front of him when he gets Apollo’s mouth everywhere else on most days. It’s hypocritical, he knows it. 

Especially given that he can do nothing but roll his eyes whenever Apollo expresses any vague suggestion of hurt or judgement concerning Starbuck’s own philandering lifestyle. _That’s different_ he thinks, he argues each time this has come up. _I sleep around, I always have, it’s how I am, but you, you’re not like that. If I frack some shuttle pilot it doesn’t mean a thing, but if you do it, I gotta worried if you’re gonna buy her a ring and send out sealing invitations tomorrow._

Apollo has a hard time meeting his eyes when they talk about this, Starbuck always has to reach for his chin and force him to look up, drag him out into the fight. _You’re being unfair,_ Apollo usually says, stony-faced and tense. _It’s double standard, and an unfair one at that, Starbuck, you don’t just get to-_

_Unfair! Unfair! It’s_ fracking, _Apollo, there is nothing fair about it, no fair in love or war_ , He had said once, and never said again given the way it had silenced them both, the solid punch of the word _love_ in all its glory, all its terror. Apollo has stared wide-eyed at him for a moment, undoubtably going over all the times they had ever talked about love, all the cruel, flippant things Starbuck had been able to say about it because it was long before they had ever gotten tangled up together in its red ribbon. _What, then. Do you love them? Do you love me? Do you even know what that is?_ Apollo had snarled, face so close to Starbuck’s he could feel the heat of his breath on his own lips. 

Starbuck can’t remember how he answered, in that moment. He knows how he feels now, bracing himself upright against a lateral pull down machine in a dark gym while he tries to block out the echo of laughter from the rejuvenation room. _Of course_ he loves Apollo, it’s a stupid question, a given. He’s always loved him, Apollo is his best friend, his wingman, his partner in crime, and there is no limit to what that means for Starbuck, to what galaxies he would travel so that he could stay by his side, to what darkness he would follow him, what fate he would seal for them both. He loves Apollo easily, simply, _of course._ It’s the number one reason why he _shouldn’_ be fracking him, but he wants it bad, and as long as Apollo wants it too, he’ll take it. 

He’d be fine with it going on forever like this, just the two of them, friends, wingmen, whatever else they are. He’s even fine with Apollo having his girls on the side in the meantime, Gods know Starbuck would never give them up. But the issue isn’t with _him_ , it isn’t _his_ life Apollo doesn’t fit into. It’s Apollo, Apollo’s name and his family and his creed and his future and his past, _that_ , that is where they don’t line up. Eventually, Apollo is going to have to fill all the roles and rise to all the titles that have been inscribed for him, and no matter which way he looks at it, there’s no room for what they have in that story. 

Starbuck rubs his face onto his bicep, tries to steady his breathing. He keeps hearing footsteps or thinking he hears them, but it could be the blood pounding in his ears, it could be the ever-present hum of the ship suddenly brought to his attention now that he is somewhere so quiet and lonely. But then, he feels a hand on his shoulder, heavy and rough and unmistakable. 

Apollo spins him around, holds him upright and studies him in the dark, eyes narrowed, “What are you _doing_ in here? You just left, people were asking, so I--”

Starbuck cuts him off, trying in vain to twist out of his grip and instead wincing at Apollo’s blunt nails bite into his shoulders. “Where is she?” he slurs, blinking.

“What? Who?” Apollo snaps. Starbuck can smell him, the spicy metal and cologne bite of him and it makes his mouth water, makes him wish he had better self control, better balance, anything. 

“Her. Shuttle pilot girl, blonde,” he mumbles, dizzy with the way Apollo is touching him, warm broad palms dragging down his arms, gripping his clothes then releasing him, half-shaking him, pawing him like he doesn’t know if he wants to hit him or throw him up against a wall and seal their mouths. Starbuck’s not sure either, he’ll take Apollo’s fist in his cheek over Apollo’s lips on hers, he’s clumsy with self-loathing, he’s drunk and confused and aching. 

“Amelia?” Apollo asks through his teeth, face mere inches from Starbuck’s, spots of color on his face. 

“Yeah, whatever. Her. Your trophy girl, wife to be, whatever she is,” Starbuck murmurs, forgetting what he was supposed to be doing and instead raising his hand to cup Apollo’s cheek, fingers curled against the bone and thumb smudging up the angle of his jaw where there’s a sheen of sweat forming. It’s the craziest thing, he wants to make his skin red, he wants to kiss marks all across his throat so everyone knows exactly what Captain Apollo does at night with his wingman, he wants to do every single thing with this person until they both die, and it makes his throat sting to know that he won’t be able to. “That girl you’re fracking. Her.” 

“Lords,” Apollo hisses, a spark of fury flickering across the blue of his eyes like a storm wave at sea before he makes two fists in the front of Starbuck’s shirt and backs him into the wall. He slams him down there, hard enough the fiberglass siding thuds painfully against Starbuck’s scapulae and an explosion of white consumes his vision. “You are so fracking ridiculous,” Apollo starts, voice low and dangerous. “I am only, _only_ seeing Amelia so I have someone to take out when you’re off with any _one_ of your girlfriends. I only brought her tonight so I’d have someone to talk to when you snuck into whatever dark corner kissing whatever girl you chose tonight. You have no idea, _none at all_ , how fracking crazy you make me,” he grinds out, little flecks of spit landing on Starbuck’s lips their brows sliding together with bruising force. 

Starbuck licks the spit away instinctively, head spinning at he tries to make sense of this whole thing. He doesn’t understand why Apollo thinks those girls _matter_ , how Apollo can’t see how fracking crazy he makes Starbuck, either. It’s a mess, it’s a mess and it can’t work, but he swallows the rage of it down, wheezing as struggles to answer, “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t take it, can never tell when you’re gonna be over this whole thing and go back to being you,” he chokes out, and it doesn’t make sense but he can’t think, he can smell Apollo’s breath fiery and clean with ambrosa, and he wants to taste it, too. 

“Frack,” Apollo swears, rubbing his forehead into Starbuck’s, forcing him up against the wall with his hips, his chest, his hands still rucking across and under his clothes. “You don’t even know. So fracked up over you, and you don’t even know it.”

Apollo thumbs over Starbuck’s lips, skin rough and salty and Starbuck bites him, doesn’t know what else to do, and then they’re kissing hard. Starbuck keeps forgetting to breathe, lips raw and swollen as Apollo holds him up against the wall by his throat and fracks his mouth with his tongue, deep and choking as he forces a hand beneath the waistband of Starbuck’s pants to feel him where he’s throbbing and leaking. _I do know it_ , Starbuck thinks, broken, staticy thoughts. _I do know it, but do you?_

Apollo groans as he touches him, growing still for a moment while he thumbs up the underside of Starbuck’s cock, sliding his index finger through the wetness beading at the crown, breath hard and labored. Starbuck thrusts clumsily into his fist, snags his hands through his hair and twists his body so that he can feel all of him, every inch of their flesh pressed flush, every plane grinding and melting together. And he doesn’t want it to stop. He could go on forever like this, Apollo stomping into dark corridors to find him and claim his skin for his own, Apollo lost and scared and angry that the simplicity of his formerly neat, planned life has been robbed from him. Starbuck will take Apollo fear-messy and hurt and jealous and imperfect, because he loves him, always has. It’s simple, easy, a given. 

But he knows, even here with Apollo’s tongue in his throat and his hand on his cock, that he can go on swallowing Apollo’s fear, but Apollo cannot go on forever being afraid. And that is what will break. Either he’ll stop being afraid, or it will fall apart, a life unable to hold Starbuck and his impossibility crowding the thorn of him out, healing over the wounds he cuts into Apollo’s palms. Adapting is an easier thing to do than overcoming fear. Any viper pilot knows that. 

Apollo yanks the neck of Starbuck’s shirt open over his shoulder and the fabric makes a distressed sound before the skin is exposed, then Apollo sinks his teeth into the stretch of it, tongue swirling over the bruise as it forms. He pulls his tunic up with his other hand, exposing Starbuck’s heaving stomach, the muscles rippling and wavering.

Wincing, Starbuck buries his face in Apollo’s hair and inhales the oily, salty smell of him, drowning in him, choking on him. He’s so close, but he doesn’t want it to end, the grief stricken breed of want that comes along with knowing it _will_ end, it always does. Starbuck lets his head roll back, lets himself sink into the clean and perfect bliss of coming. 

Apollo watches him, brow pressed to his bitten shoulder as he stares down between their bodies at the splatter of sticky white falling in parabolas onto Starbuck’s stomach, clinging to his chest hair in hot, messy strings. They lie there for a moment, gasping and stricken, then, as if he must, Apollo sinks to his knees between Starbuck’s. Holding the torn tunic up he leans in and licks it all away, eating Starbuck’s come off his still shuddering stomach, with his eyes closed and his head bent. Starbuck’s not sure why, but the sight of him there makes the lonely fissures inside his chest open up again, the heartbreak set back in with a dull, sickening ache. 

\---  
Apollo knows it has to end. It _has to_ , it’s like quicksand, like deep space. He had one foot in and what he mistook for a firm grip on sense, and then, before he knew it, he was sinking beneath the surface and struggling to take his his final breath before disappearing completely. Now, he doesn’t know how to get out. His arms pinwheel and he fights to breathe but still, it sucks him deeper, Starbuck’s infernal thrill, his golden glow and pirate’s grin and Apollo is so fracking in love with him he doesn’t think he can survive it. 

He’s in the rejuvenation room, pushing his hands through his hair over and over again like it might clear his head enough he can actually contribute to the conversation going on around him, some old timers reliving their Cylon-fighting glory days with half of the squadron eating it up over grog. It’s the type of story he usually loves, chrome and exhaust and gunfire, but Starbuck keeps looking at him across the table, eyes wide beneath the suggestive arch of his brow, jacket un-buckled and begging to be tugged off and tossed to the floor carelessly, and Apollo can’t think straight. Starbuck is making it clear that he wants to get away, he wants Apollo to excuse himself so he can follow, and Apollo wants it, too. It’s not something that just _happens_ anymore, it’s something he seeks out with a determined hunger, something he craves. It’s not just something he’s lost control over, its something which controls _him_. 

There used to be a time, even after they’d started this mess, when Apollo could share space with Starbuck and it didn’t feel any different than it used to. They were still wingmen above all else, he could still sling an arm around Starbuck’s shoulder without his stomach falling ruin to heat and tangles, he could still spent the night in his own bunk without feeling like it was a lie, a mistake to be alone. He could still pursue women with something more than a forced interest, he could still imagine striving for future where he did everything that was expected of him. 

But now, it’s muddled and confused, a mess of twisted wires and broken circuitry. He doesn’t know how to disengage, he doesn’t know how to re-program himself to want anything beyond Starbuck’s teeth in his lip, a want which seems so pure and authentic it _must_ be able to coexist along with everything else he is, everything else he is meant to become. He rubs his face into his knuckles, well aware of the way Starbuck is half-looking at him, across the table, scouring over the lines in his neck, up to the bones in his jaw. 

Itching, Apollo stands, shrugging his jacket back on, eyes scanning the table at his squadron. No one notices him, everyone’s gaze still fixed on the veterans and their grand, absurd fish tale. Everyone save for Starbuck, of course, who watches him carefully from the corner of his eye, face slack in mock innocence. The way Starbuck looks at him makes him flush in it’s heavy and intentional, and it’s no wonder he can hardly sit here and endure it with crawling skin. 

“Excuse me,” Apollo murmurs, sliding out from his chair and nodding to Boomer who only half glances in his direction. Cheeks burning, Apollo retreats, down the hall to the barracks and towards his Captain’s quarters, head bent. 

Starbuck’s footsteps echo behind him like a pantomime of his own heartbeat, and he drags his palms over his face, a mess of conflicting impulses. _It has to end_ he tells himself, even as his stomach tightens at the knowledge that Starbuck is following him, the knowledge of what they will do once the door is locked. _It has to end_ , he thinks again, even as he lets himself into his quarters and deposits himself on the edge of the bed, unbuckling his jacket, fingers ghosting over the terrified, yearning thrum of his heart. _It has to end_ , he thinks, as the door clicks back open and Starbuck sidles in, eyes half lidded, smile half sly, half guilty. _It has to end_

He rises without formally deciding to, meeting Starbuck in the middle of the room and pulling his body flush by the collar of his jacket. He can feel Starbuck’s teeth in their kiss, his breath ragged and messy as they pull apart. Apollo drives Starbuck into the wall, holds him there and rucks his shirt up out of the waistband of his uniform pants, seeking skin with a shaking hand. It’s always like this, nothing ever changes, he never gets _used_ to the way Starbuck feels under him, he never loses the sense of terror-stricken urgency that closes like a fist in his throat when they’re together.

He licks deep into Starbuck’s mouth, starved for the metallic, smoky taste of him, his fingers tightening around his throat, chasing heat under the collar of his jacket. Starbuck has this lazy, swollen-lipped smile plastered across his face each time they part, and when Apollo dives back in he tries to break it, tries to bite it into a different shape, something that doesn’t twist knives of reckless hunger into his guts.“What are you doing to me?” Apollo murmurs between the fierce, bruising wet of kisses, dragging his nails down the small of Starbuck’s back until he arches into him, hissing. 

Starbuck wheezes in laugher and it rumbles through their shifting bodies. “What am I doing to you? Why is this all my fault?” 

Apollo shakes his head, heart so far up into his throat is chokes him, makes him flush and shudder as he steers Starbuck to his bed, teeth in his throat. They topple gracelessly to the mattress, rolling and pushing and bucking and Apollo is desperate with how badly he wants him, terrified by how powerless he is against its sway. _It has to end_ , he begs his body as he chews a pathway down Starbuck’s neck, as he struggles with his belt and yanks his pants down over his thighs with wild, heedless hands. 

Starbuck pushes him off, cheeks scarlet and eyes half-lidded as he rolls off the bed between and to his knees, a hair licked up in chaos, off kilter in in his ruined uniform. Apollo watches him, vision hazy and heart pounding, wondering what it will take for him to kill this thing that possesses such a furious will to live. Then his thoughts stutter and die in his head as Starbuck pushes his thighs apart and pitches forward, parting his lips to mouth along the thick, heavy outline of Apollo’s cock through his uniform pants. 

He can feel the heat of Starbuck’s breath coming out in desperate, uneven huffs, he can feel the tremor in his fingers as he works Apollo’s belt and buttons open with one hand, spreading the other wide on the gathering flicker of Apollo’s abdominals. Starbuck makes the fabric wet, sucking it into into his mouth, tonguing along the seam and it’s too much. The image of his wingman with a mouthful of cotton should not frack with Apollo’s head like this, shouldn’t make him come undone, should not steal his control, but it does. 

Starbuck works him out of his pants roughly and Apollo winces, makes a fist in his hair like he might pull him away, like he could if he wanted to. Then it happens, the sloppy wet heat of Starbuck’s mouth open and drooling along Apollo’s shaft, licking messily up to the flared crown before swallowing him down. 

Apollo collapses backwards onto the bed, thighs splayed and twitching as he arches off the mattress to frack Starbuck’s mouth, lost, beside himself. It’s too good a thing, too perfect a slickness, and he thinks about nothing until he’s coming down Starbuck’s throat, ears ringing with his own animal breathing and Starbuck’s low, long, satisfied groan. He lies there while Starbuck licks him up, teeth grit against the sensitivity, wondering what it was he was supposed to do, what it was it was supposed to be resisting. 

Starbuck rubs his cheek against the inside of his thigh, the rough scrape of stubble and it brings him back sharply to the present, his wingman on the floor between his spread legs, the rejuvenation room they ditched in favor of each other, stories of Cylons, a the promise potential war-glory, a life mapped out like the galaxy, every star in its perfect, appointed place. 

Very suddenly, Apollo feels empty. Starbuck crawls up beside him, mouth shining with spit and sweat and come, eyes still so bright and full of pupil. He moves so he’s straddling Apollo’s ribcage, rucked open pants already falling around his narrow hips, pulled down by the weight of his belt, revealing several inches of damp golden hair bisecting the skin stretched between his obliques. Apollo wants to lick it, wants to reach for him and grab him by the belt loops and pull him down to his own lips so he can suck the saltiness from his body, so he can kiss up the underside of his cock with an open mouth. He wants it _so bad_ , this terrible thing. 

He doesn’t want to end it, even though he knows it must, even though his chest feels bust open with the weight of the whole fracking infinite universe, expansive, uncharted, terrifying. The ache of it all must be showing on his face because Starbuck’s expression softens, he drops to his elbows and knees over Apollo’s chest and smooths a hand through his hair, thumbing across his lips, “You got that look on,” he mumbles, lips ghosting across Apollo’s temple, breath warm. “The one that makes me wonder if you’re gonna bolt at that door with your pants around your ass.” 

Apollo laughs without humor, a short bark and he turns away from Starbuck, eyes scanning blearily up the wall adjacent to his bed, military-stark, grey and lonely. His palms move beyond his reason or judgement, palming up Starbuck’s thighs, down the ladder of his spine, under the hem of his tunic to count ribs, abdominals. _It has to end_ he thinks about saying, but the words get choked silent in his throat and he swallows them down reflexively. “I don’t know,” is what he ends up saying instead, hand stilling between Starbuck’s shoulder blades. “I don’t know what we’re doing anymore.” 

He feels Starbuck shrug under his palm. “Me either. All the same, I can’t stop doing it.” He sits up on his haunches, looking down at Apollo with his head cocked, hair a mess, hectic spots of color on his cheeks and Apollo can’t _stand_ the ache of it, so he looks away. Starbuck shrugs again, and continues. “I don’t really care where it takes us. I always knew I was gonna die young and pretty and bloody, anyway. So,” he says, reaching for Apollo’s chin with rough fingers and forcing their eyes to meet. “So...you can come with me, like decent wingman. Or not. I’ll keep at it though, no matter how far you follow me.” 

It feels like something is being wrenched out from under Apollo, his footing, his life, his self concept. It feels like exiting a launch tube and surfacing in all that black, gazing out upon an infinite stretch of dark, glorious space to hurtle indefinitely into. Or to fear. Apollo doesn’t know anymore. He rubs his face with his palm, feels Starbuck shift until he’s lying on top of him, their legs twined and his fingers in his hair, his weight crushing the breath out of him. “What do you say?” Starbuck asks. 

“That you’re crazy,” Apollo tells him, voice coming out strangled. He swallows and swallows until Starbuck leans down and presses a wet, open mouthed kiss to his Adam’s apple, tonguing over the whorls of cartilage, razing his teeth over the vulnerable thrum of Apollo’s pulse. 

“Yeah, maybe,” Starbuck murmurs, pulling away to gaze down at Apollo with this terrible, impossible look and it’s too much, all of it. “But at least I’m not boring.” Quicksand, deep space, and Apollo is pulling Starbuck down again, kissing him breathless because anything else feels like a mistake, like a lie. 

_It has to stop_ , he thinks, betraying hands sliding up to tangle in Starbuck’s hair and hold him there, flush against his chest, tongue flicking at the roof of his mouth. _But not today._


End file.
